Companies and people exploited by trial lawyers

Costs go up; products are harder to use

RIVERTON – I pulled up to a gas pump earlier this month and noticed a fellow struggling with a gas can.

He gave me an exasperated look and said, “These new cans are almost impossible to use.”

There is no doubt about that.

Gas cans are being made with removable funnels instead of spouts.

Or if a can does have a spout, it also has some sort of check valve on it that makes it difficult to empty or fill.

But don’t blame the engineers.

Blame the trial lawyers.

Litigation has imperiled the domestic safety can industry.

In fact, last year, Blitz USA, then the nation’s largest gas can-maker, went out of business after spending $30 million defending itself in court and still owed $3 million in lawyer fees at the time of its bankruptcy, according to news reports.

How often do you see a company such as Blitz, with 75 percent of the domestic market, shut its doors?

It wasn’t the vagaries of the marketplace that put the firm out of business, it was the legal system.

Some products can never be perfectly safe, particularly when people don’t use them wisely.

According to The Wall Street Journal, most of the lawsuits came from folks who tried to pour gasoline onto fires and were burned.

Who speaks for the rest of us who are wise enough not to pour gasoline onto open fires, but are still forced to pay more for products that are harder to use?

The cost of litigation gets passed on in the price of products. For example, I had a 5-gallon steel gasoline can stolen from my garage last month. It cost more than $70 to replace. That’s about $30 more than the stolen one cost.

While Blitz was an Oklahoma company, Illinois businesses are even more vulnerable to lawsuits.

In 2012, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform ranked Illinois 46th of the 50 states for its legal fairness.